The Future of Education

The pedagogy of inquiry-based science education (IBSE) is examined as an appropriate response to the main challenge of educational systems in knowledge-based society: increased demand for scientifically literate labour force with analytical thinking skills. Being widely applied, IBSE contributes to the fact that the majority of population understands the natural phenomena and societal events and is aware how science operates and how technology shapes the material and intellectual world. Bringing the intellectual challenge into the classroom and putting the accent on the satisfaction of child's natural curiosity, IBSE forms the basis for a profoundly scientific understanding of the world and, in the long run, determines the success of personality’s lifelong learning path. IBSE is a constructivist pedagogy which, through its cyclical structure, correlates with project-based learning. All deliverables of an IBSE project belong exclusively to students, and in this sense, inquiry-based learning is an active learning. IBSE offers to the groups of students a higher degree of freedom enabling them formulate hypotheses, build and further test models and formulate the laws. IBSE is about actively acquired knowledge. The essence of IBSE is to shape those skills which are necessary for lifelong learning. The skills could be structured into few categories: a) Social interaction and group collaboration skills meaning the inclusion of the student with his/her ideas and capacities, attention to the peers’ ideas, ability to analyze the situation from several points of view; b) Skills related to the interaction and exploration of material world – observation, measuring, questioning, researching. These skills form the attention to details, teach students use measuring devices and understand the sense of collected data; c) Reasoning skills – when IBSE is applied permanently students come gradually to the scientific understanding of phenomena. Thus, the learning process developed in an IBSE way forms students’ scientific vision and conception about the world – an objective which is practically at the horizon of school education; d) Communication skills –the ability to present in public the results of the research of the own group is a valuable because, along with oratory skills, the active scientific vocabulary rich in notions, terms, definitions is formed.

Keywords: inquiry-based science education, scientific literacy, lifelong learning;